24 found
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  1. Infinite Prospects.Jeffrey Sanford Russell & Yoaav Isaacs - 2021 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (1):178-198.
    People with the kind of preferences that give rise to the St. Petersburg paradox are problematic---but not because there is anything wrong with infinite utilities. Rather, such people cannot assign the St. Petersburg gamble any value that any kind of outcome could possibly have. Their preferences also violate an infinitary generalization of Savage's Sure Thing Principle, which we call the *Countable Sure Thing Principle*, as well as an infinitary generalization of von Neumann and Morgenstern's Independence axiom, which we call *Countable (...)
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  2. Updating without evidence.Yoaav Isaacs & Jeffrey Sanford Russell - 2023 - Noûs 57 (3):576-599.
    Sometimes you are unreliable at fulfilling your doxastic plans: for example, if you plan to be fully confident in all truths, probably you will end up being fully confident in some falsehoods by mistake. In some cases, there is information that plays the classical role of evidence—your beliefs are perfectly discriminating with respect to some possible facts about the world—and there is a standard expected‐accuracy‐based justification for planning to conditionalize on this evidence. This planning‐oriented justification extends to some cases where (...)
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  3. Multiple Universes and Self-Locating Evidence.Yoaav Isaacs, John Hawthorne & Jeffrey Sanford Russell - 2022 - Philosophical Review 131 (3):241-294.
    Is the fact that our universe contains fine-tuned life evidence that we live in a multiverse? Ian Hacking and Roger White influentially argue that it is not. We approach this question through a systematic framework for self-locating epistemology. As it turns out, leading approaches to self-locating evidence agree that the fact that our own universe contains fine-tuned life indeed confirms the existence of a multiverse. This convergence is no accident: we present two theorems showing that, in this setting, any updating (...)
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  4. Evil and Evidence.Matthew A. Benton, John Hawthorne & Yoaav Isaacs - 2016 - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 7:1-31.
    The problem of evil is the most prominent argument against the existence of God. Skeptical theists contend that it is not a good argument. Their reasons for this contention vary widely, involving such notions as CORNEA, epistemic appearances, 'gratuitous' evils, 'levering' evidence, and the representativeness of goods. We aim to dispel some confusions about these notions, in particular by clarifying their roles within a probabilistic epistemology. In addition, we develop new responses to the problem of evil from both the phenomenal (...)
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  5. Fine-Tuning Fine-Tuning.John Hawthorne & Yoaav Isaacs - 2018 - In Matthew A. Benton, John Hawthorne & Dani Rabinowitz (eds.), Knowledge, Belief, and God: New Insights in Religious Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 136-168.
  6. The rationality of epistemic akrasia.John Hawthorne, Yoaav Isaacs & Maria Lasonen-Aarnio - 2021 - Philosophical Perspectives 35 (1):206-228.
    Philosophical Perspectives, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 206-228, December 2021.
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  7. Non-Measurability, Imprecise Credences, and Imprecise Chances.Yoaav Isaacs, Alan Hájek & John Hawthorne - 2021 - Mind 131 (523):892-916.
    – We offer a new motivation for imprecise probabilities. We argue that there are propositions to which precise probability cannot be assigned, but to which imprecise probability can be assigned. In such cases the alternative to imprecise probability is not precise probability, but no probability at all. And an imprecise probability is substantially better than no probability at all. Our argument is based on the mathematical phenomenon of non-measurable sets. Non-measurable propositions cannot receive precise probabilities, but there is a natural (...)
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  8. Counting Your Chickens.Yoaav Isaacs, Adam Lerner & Jeffrey Sanford Russell - 2024 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 102 (3):675-692.
    Suppose that, for reasons of animal welfare, it would be better if everyone stopped eating chicken. Does it follow that you should stop eating chicken? Proponents of the “inefficacy objection” argue that, due to the scale and complexity of markets, the expected effects of your chicken purchases are negligible. So the expected effects of eating chicken do not make it wrong. -/- We argue that this objection does not succeed, in two steps. First, empirical data about chicken production tells us (...)
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  9. Solving a Paradox of Evidential Equivalence.Cian Dorr, John Hawthorne & Yoaav Isaacs - 2021 - Mind 130 (520):1159–82.
    David Builes presents a paradox concerning how confident you should be that any given member of an infinite collection of fair coins landed heads, conditional on the information that they were all flipped and only finitely many of them landed heads. We argue that if you should have any conditional credence at all, it should be 1/2.
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  10. Misapprehensions about the Fine-Tuning Argument.John Hawthorne & Yoaav Isaacs - 2017 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 81:133-155.
    The fine-tuning argument purports to show that particular aspects of fundamental physics provide evidence for the existence of God. This argument is legitimate, yet there are numerous doubts about its legitimacy. There are various misgivings about the fine-tuning argument which are based on misunderstandings. In this paper we will go over several major misapprehensions, and explain why they do not undermine the basic cogency of the fine-tuning argument.
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  11. The problems of transformative experience.Yoaav Isaacs - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (4):1065-1084.
    Laurie Paul has recently argued that transformative experiences pose a problem for decision theory. According to Paul, agents facing transformative experiences do not possess the states required for decision theory to formulate its prescriptions. Agents facing transformative experiences are impoverished relative to their decision problems, and decision theory doesn’t know what to do with impoverished agents. Richard Pettigrew takes Paul’s challenge seriously. He grants that decision theory cannot handle decision problems involving transformative experiences. To deal with the problems posed by (...)
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  12. Probabilities Cannot Be Rationally Neglected.Yoaav Isaacs - 2016 - Mind 125 (499):759-762.
    In response to Smith, I argue that probabilities cannot be rationally neglected. I show that Smith’s proposal for ignoring low-probability outcomes must, on pain of violating dominance reasoning, license taking arbitrarily high risk for arbitrarily little reward.
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  13. The Fallacy of Calibrationism.Yoaav Isaacs - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 102 (2):247-260.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.
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  14. Duty and knowledge.Yoaav Isaacs - 2014 - Philosophical Perspectives 28 (1):95-110.
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  15. Evidential Decision Theory and the Ostrich.Yoaav Isaacs & Ben Levinstein - 2024 - Philosophers' Imprint 24 (1).
    Evidential Decision Theory is flawed, but its flaws are not fully understood. David Lewis (1981) famously charged that EDT recommends an irrational policy of managing the news and “commends the ostrich as rational”. Lewis was right, but the case he appealed to—Newcomb’s Problem—does not demonstrate his conclusion. Indeed, decision theories other than EDT, such as Committal Decision Theory and Functional Decision Theory, agree with EDT's verdicts in Newcomb’s Problem, but their flaws, whatever they may be, do not stem from any (...)
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  16. Permissivism, Margin-for-Error, and Dominance.John Hawthorne & Yoaav Isaacs - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (2):515-532.
    Ginger Schultheis offers a novel and interesting argument against epistemic permissivism. While we think that her argument is ultimately uncompelling, we think its faults are instructive. We explore the relationship between epistemic permissivism, Margin-for-Error principles, and an epistemological version of Dominance reasoning.
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  17. Absolutism and its Limits.John Hawthorne, Yoaav Isaacs & Clayton Littlejohn - 2023 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 21 (1-2):170-189.
    Many philosophers think that given the choice between saving the life of an innocent person and averting any number of minor ailments or inconveniences, it would be better to save the life. How, then, should one compare the risk of an innocent person’s life to such minor ailments and inconveniences? If lives are infinitely more important than insignificant factors then any risk cannot be outweighed, and that is untenable. An alternative approach seems more promising: let the values of such insignificant (...)
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  18. A patchwork epistemology of disagreement?Yoaav Isaacs - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (7):1873-1885.
    The epistemology of disagreement standardly divides conciliationist views from steadfast views. But both sorts of views are subject to counterexample—indeed, both sorts of views are subject to the same counterexample. After presenting this counterexample, I explore how the epistemology of disagreement should be reconceptualized in light of it.
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  19. A new prospect for epistemic aggregation.Daniel Berntson & Yoaav Isaacs - 2013 - Episteme 10 (3):269-281.
    How should the opinion of a group be related to the opinions of the group members? In this article, we will defend a package of four norms – coherence, locality, anonymity and unanimity. Existing results show that there is no tenable procedure for aggregating outright beliefs or for aggregating credences that meet these criteria. In response, we consider the prospects for aggregating credal pairs – pairs of prior probabilities and evidence. We show that there is a method of aggregating credal (...)
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  20. Decision Theory without Luminosity.Yoaav Isaacs & Benjamin A. Levinstein - 2023 - Mind 133 (530):346-376.
    Our decision-theoretic states are not luminous. We are imperfectly reliable at identifying our own credences, utilities and available acts, and thus can never be more than imperfectly reliable at identifying the prescriptions of decision theory. The lack of luminosity affords decision theory a remarkable opportunity — to issue guidance on the basis of epistemically inaccessible facts. We show how a decision theory can guarantee action in accordance with contingent truths about which an agent is arbitrarily uncertain. It may seem that (...)
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  21. Infelicitous Conditionals and KK.John Hawthorne & Yoaav Isaacs - 2024 - Mind 133 (529):196-209.
    Kevin Dorst (2019) uses the ‘manifest unassertability’ of conditionals of the form ‘If I don’t know p, then p’ as a new motivation for the KK thesis. In this paper we show that his argumentation is misguided. Plausible heuristics offer a compelling and nuanced explanation of the relevant infelicity data. Meanwhile, Dorst relies on tools that, quite independently of KK, turn out to be rather poor predictors of the infelicity of indicative conditionals.
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  22.  80
    Statistical evidence and incentives in the law.John Hawthorne, Yoaav Isaacs & Vishnu Sridharan - 2021 - Philosophical Issues 31 (1):128-145.
    Philosophical Issues, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 128-145, October 2021.
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  23.  94
    A Probabilistic Analysis of Title IX Reforms.Yoaav Isaacs & Jason Iuliano - 2021 - Journal of Political Philosophy 30 (1):70-93.
  24.  15
    Accounting for Intrinsic Values in the Federal Student Loan System.Yoaav Isaacs & Jason Iuliano - 2018 - In David Boonin (ed.), Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 469-477.
    There is a growing sentiment that federal student loans should be allocated according to students’ expected earning potential. If federal student loans were given so that the government could make a profit, then such a system would make sense. But this is not so. Instead, the US government issues student loans with the goal of benefiting society—and, in particular, of benefitting the loan recipients themselves. Although some of this benefit is expressed in higher earning potential, much of it is not. (...)
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